Sunday, October 14, 2012

When Fiction Goes Digital

It’s
been said many times that if Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be writing for TV.
Well, if Calvino, Cortazar and B.S. Johnson were here now, they’d be working on
apps that redefine narrative. Robert Coover, in fact, wrote perceptively about
the implications of hypertext decades ago, speculating on the emergence of “a
third voice”, distinct from the priestly and the demotic. It’s just this sort
of voice that may be emerging now.

Although
they say people are reading less than they used to, it's also true that they're
reading more on the Web, even if it's just status updates on Facebook.
Publishers have been trying to ride this change, tailoring their offerings to
synch with changing reading habits.

There’s
Faber’s iPad app of Eliot’s The Waste
Land, the Penguin app of Kerouac’s On
The Road and, more recently, Sourcebooks’s Shakesperience. All of these comprise, apart from the text, a
series of video interpretations, readings, interviews and glossaries. Thus,
these interactive encyclopedias, marvellously produced, use a different medium
to provide, in marketing jargon, “an immersive experience”-- but they clearly
don’t aim to do more than that.

Others
are trying to turn low attention spans to their advantage. Last month, Amazon launched
Kindle Serials, wherein readers could download and pay for volumes, one episode
at a time. There are nine such serials so far, all of them in genres such as
murder mysteries, sci-fi and detective novels -- no doubt because of their
abilities to end episodes on a high, leaving the reader panting for more.
Another digital publisher, Byliner, has also launched similar serials, the
first two by Margaret Atwood and Joe McGinniss. (This is the moment to insert
the obligatory Charles Dickens reference.)

Such
ventures don’t play with established notions of a written text; others,
however, are thinking differently. Take Coliloquy, a “technology-based provider
of active fiction”, that also serves up episodic content, but makes the story
branch out into different directions depending on reader feedback. So far, they
deal with young adult, romance, and adventure, and readers can vote for not
just future plotlines but also character attributes and locations, among other
things. To me, this smacks of pandering to existing tastes, rather than setting
out to create something intrinsically new.

What’s
of much more interest is The Silent
History, an app released this month by a team comprising Eli Horowitz, former
managing editor of McSweeneys, as well as other writers and digital publishers,
and “a team of contributors on five continents”.

Calling
itself “a new kind of novel”, The Silent
History sets out to provide the fictional record of a time in the near
future when children are afflicted by a mysterious genetic mutation that
renders them incapable of speech. (Fans of J.J. Abrams TV shows, take note.)

Within
the app, first-person testimonials are released one day at a time, from Monday
to Saturday -- among those released so far are one by nanny in New Jersey
looking after a boy whose parents are away on cruise, by a diagnostician in
Texas examining the pathology of the speechless and by a neurologist in
Massachusetts stumped by the silent children but determined to know more.

What
makes it even more innovative is a section called field reports: “site specific
accounts of the many unexpected ways this silence is colliding with our
physical world”. Such reports can only be read as and when you're actually
present at the site being written about -- they’re unlocked when your
device's location services synchs with the app.

Having
read the first few episodes on my iPad, I downloaded the app onto my phone to
continue reading, only to find, time and again, the annoying message that a
server problem prevented the app from being “populated”.

Though
they were prompt, professional and polite when I e-mailed to let them know, I
couldn't help but think that there are times when there’s really no substitute
for a printed book.